Poetry

La Perruque


I’m speaking at the sub-meta level
about the infra-inferential beyond: Bon jour.
Ni hao. Guten Tag. Shalom. I bungee around,
Gestalting out. I’m brain-waving to this short haul
video. I’m pilfering office supplies. On and off, I’m sounding
the depths of hoo-ha. I’m sniffing glue. I’m watching my calories
burn on the elliptical. Hello, I’m mixing cranberry vodka into my Slurpee
at a Chicagoland 7-Eleven. I’m body-surfing a poem. No,
I’m leaning over, closing a tab on a browser right now. I’m chewing
panini with hummus spread, tarragon, a lemon wedge, and a generous
crumble of feta. Why, I’m a pole-vaulting dwarf. I’m mostly cut-and-paste.
I’m a pile of paper slips in a Chinese room. I’m a daisy-chain
of inwrought paper clips. I’m sipping the gaze of a meter maid with cauliflower ears
(a meter man?), who looks as fluid as a two-way mirror or a sales rep. A spastic lull
withers—and, see, there’s nothing to solve. His coke-nose is gnashed;
his little beanie hat, as colorful as any genome splice. Aloha, monsieur.

What else? I’ve forgotten my Klingon.
I open my mouth. Light pours through the dark
jigsaw of organs: the wrists of small birds totter upright.
Their gentle tots sway. The gables wear a beard
of icicles, which Rachmaninov as they fall. Each punctum
dams a finger up its gushing self. ¡Olé!

Pink noise over narrow bandwidths,
and the last glimmer of daylight is like Lazarus,
that punk, waking up
as he misrecognizes heaven.

Will Cordeiro has recent or forthcoming publications in Harpur Palate, Waccamaw, Sentence, The Prose Poem Project, A cappella Zoo, Spiral Orb, and Word for/Word. He is a Ph.D. candidate studying 18th century British literature at Cornell.